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The Museum’s Collections document the fate of Holocaust victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others through artifacts, documents, photos, films, books, personal stories, and more. Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center.

Ina R. Friedman donated her oral history interviews to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Aug. 8, 2005. Ms. Friedman is the author of "Escape or Die," "Flying Against the Wind," and "Other Victims," which explore the experiences of Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Record last modified: 2018-01-22 10:42:17
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn90044

Also in Ina R. Friedman collection

Consists of research files, oral history interviews, transcripts, and notes produced by Ina R. Friedman during her research for her books on the Holocaust. Collection also includes original documents and identity cards for Dr. Richard Kahn and Ida Stern Kahn, originally of Berlin, Germany, as well as information about Cato Bontjes Van Beek, a member of the Resistance.

Consists of research files, transcripts, and notes produced by Ina R. Friedman in her research for her numerous books on the Holocaust. Also includes a large collection of oral histories conducted by Ina Friedman for use in her research. Also includes original documents and identity cards for Dr. Richard Kahn and Ida Stern Kahn, originally of Berlin, Germany, as well as information about Cato Bontjes Van Beek, a member of the resistance.

Bessie Jones discusses her role in The Window Shop, a group of Jewish and Christian women, mostly the wives of professors, in Cambridge, MA that brought European refugees to the United States and helped them with employment.

Franciska Mikus (née Schwarz; also known as Franziska and Fran), born in Munich, Germany, describes her experience as a Deaf Holocaust survivor; growing up Christian; having two siblings and being the only one born Deaf; her Deaf father (born in Bogenhausen), who could hear noises but could not distinguish sounds; her family’s belief that her grandfather’s over-drinking caused deafness in two of his 17 children; not being able to speak in her earliest years and expressing herself only through her own sign language; Fran communicating with her hearing mother through lip reading; her mother teaching her to sew; attending a hard of hearing class; asking her parents to transfer her to a school for the Deaf; having difficulty in learning to read lips; struggling with her penmanship because of her malnourished hands; feeling her intelligence was not fully realized; desiring to become women’s tailor; attending a Catholic club for Deaf girls at a nun’s order for training in dressmaking; the rise of antisemitism; her brother who was excited by Hitler; beginning to date her boyfriend Christian Mikus in 1934; how Christian lost his hearing because of Scarlett fever; learning of ominous reports from Christian about things going on in Dachau; being required to join the League of German Girls and the leaders’ interactions with the girls; the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses); receiving a government order to be sterilized along with her mother; her family petitioning the order, but only her mother being excused from the order; undergoing forced sterilization; her mother being upset at Christian and Fran’s unexpected (out of marriage) pregnancy; the family doctor reporting the pregnancy to the government; receiving a government letter for a forced abortion; seeking a marriage license in 1941 and the registrar’s requirement for a second sterilization; having complications from the procedures; their post-war struggles finding work as a Deaf couple; and their accomplishments in assisting the Deaf community. [Note: more information on Fran’s experiences can be found in the book “The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis”.]

Harmut Teuber describes the experiences of the Deaf community in Germany during WWII; the experiences of Dr. Eugene Bergmann, a professor at Gallaudet who was in the Warsaw Ghetto; the close connection of people in the Deaf world; Horst Biesold, a teacher for the Deaf; the sterilization of Deaf people in Nazi Germany; how some Deaf people cooperated with Nazi racial hygiene policies while others escaped them; how Deaf people were not institutionalized in contrast to the mentally disabled; stories about the last days of the war about Deaf men who were fighting on the home front; the death of 300 Deaf men who were killed upon the arrival of the Russians; how the home guard fighters including the Deaf were inexperienced and undertrained; how many Deaf men felt discriminated against because they were not allowed in army; his philosophy that Deafness is normal and world needs Deaf culture to be complete; how many Deaf people were used in industries and only had problems when they wished or marry or have children; the town of Broumov, Czechoslovakia where he was born in 1940; how his father and others living in the Sudetenland dodged service in the army by being farmers; his school for the Deaf run by Catholic nuns; how the school was able to maintain independence because it was run by Catholic Church; how Hitler’s photo was not displayed in the classroom but instead in some dimly lit hallway, which was a small form of resistance; how when a Deaf couple would go to a Nazi party representative/Justice of the peace to get married, the Party representative would try to get the couple’s relatives to convince them to be sterilized, but officials had a hard time communicating with Deaf community; how officials would go to the Nuns for communication, but the Nuns would intervene with the sterilization through interference; how Hitler disbanded all independent organizations, but Deaf clubs and organizations were allowed to exist more or less independently; and his culture shock at coming to United States to study at Gallaudet and seeing a type of “hurrah” nationalism while post war Europe was more about unity and World perspective.

Fridolin Wasserkamp, born circa 1928 in Braunschweig, Germany, discusses living with his grandparents; being Deaf; being raised Christian; doing numerous activities, including table tennis, swimming, and hunting; attending a Hitler Youth school for the Deaf; wearing Nazi armband on his uniform; his frequent visits to his parents and brother, who were living in a rural town; enduring bombings, rations, and seeking food on the black market; the plight of the German Deaf; the disappearance of Deaf Jews in his class and hearing he had been sent to a concentration camp but not knowing what that meant; becoming aware at age 13 of the Nazi law concerning the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses); the arrival of a government letter in 1941 that demanded his sterilization and his grandfather responding to it; his Deaf father and brother also being forced to be sterilized; how his family was willing to go to the hospital out of a sense of community and their desires to help the Nazis; the objections from the local bishops; the sterilization procedure, which required him to be in the hospital for two weeks; how many in the Deaf school endured similar experiences but no one talked about it; getting married to a Deaf woman; receiving reparations from the German government; his life at the Hitler Youth school; his pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi teachers; being stopped on the street once by Gestapo and showing a pass verifying his enrollment in a Deaf school; his illegal association with his Polish girlfriend and providing her with black market cigarettes and alcohol while she was in forced labor; their communication through sign language; being prevented from promotion within the Hitler Youth because of his association with his Polish girlfriend; hearing forced laborers share stories of the horrors of camps and how he didn’t believe it; his deep regrets in having believed the Nazi message; his hope that it never happens again; and witnessing the lights of the Russian liberation bombings.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.